Behind These Eyes - January 2001

Tuesday, 2 January

Out of the blue, my licence arrived today, a good two weeks before I expected it! Hooray! Amazing!

Oh. Rats. Now I have no excuse to put off taking Driver Ed. :-)

Seriously, I am going to take Driver Ed. Things are different enough here that it would be crazy not to. Also, the driver's test here is a real test, not the rubber stamp test we get in the US, so I have a lot of laws and signs and symbols and customs to drill into my head. It occurs to me that there must be a fair number of people coming here who hail from right-side-driving countries, so there may even be driving instructors who are experienced at helping with such transitions. Perhaps I can find one.

Meanwhile, getting some things done on the work front. Our GroupWise system requires three agents to run on the server in each (NT) office. This is a nuisance because it means the server has to be left logged in, which isn't very good from a security standpoint and also is a point of failure (a user may not know, and log it out; or if the server restarts itself, none of the agents get started because nobody logs in). Thanks to some timely information from Mike, who knows much more about the NT System account than I do, I may now be able to run the three GW agents as services (which means they run even if nobody is logged in at the server). There are trade-offs, and it's not perfect, but it's a lot better than the way we're doing it now. I'm testing it in the lab; if that goes well I'll try some bigger, higher traffic offices in a few days.

I have yet more to do in the lab NetWare-to-NT migration. The frustrating thing about a process like this is that I have to make one change, then sit back and wait for the fallout before I can go on to do anything else. It makes the whole process drag out far longer than I'd like. Anyway, I have some more file moves and copies to do tonight, after the lab staff go home, so around 10:30 or 11:00 our time.

I think in the US we take for granted that our work has a right to us 24 hours a day. It's not that way here. For instance, Jill called me on Boxing Day to report a problem that had been discovered after one of my lab file moves. This greatly startled Mike's relatives--calling someone at home, the day after christmas? Whereas I think nothing of it, except maybe to be happy that it wasn't at 4 AM, and didn't require me to cut a vacation short or anything else truly intrusive.

Created at 22:43

Thursday, 4 January

A very busy day yesterday.

(Warning: Mostly technical, until the end.)

Much of the afternoon was spent on the phone with work, helping Graphics resolve some problems with a browser-based app they're trying to roll out. It uses QuickTime to display movies and play sound files. They thought they had it working back in July, but now it appears to be broken in different ways depending on the individual computer. There is still much to be resolved, but it's mostly in Jill's court.

Consequently I then spent some time on the phone with Jill, walking her through using the IEAK (Internet Explorer Administration Kit) so she could try making changes to our IE55 rollout configuration, which might resolve some of Graphics' problems.

But what I really meant to work on was the lab's continuing NetWare-to-NT migration. In the midst of moving data around, they've been having ongoing problems with how they log on. Ever since I moved their logon script to NT, they've had trouble with their startup group apps complaining that they can't find drives. This looked a lot like NT not running the entire logon script before allowing the workstation to run startup group items. I'm using a scripting utility to write their logon scripts, so I thought perhaps as soon as the executable was launched, NT considered the logon script to be finished. I tried changing them to a batch file that called the executable, but that didn't fix anything. Yesterday I finally figured out the problem: NT really is letting the workstation run startup group items before finishing the logon script. Now, NT does this by default, but as soon as we figured this out (way back in about 1997), we turned this off, forcing it to wait till the logon script is done. I therefore knew that it couldn't be that they didn't have this setting, because we've had that turned off for so long. Well, guess what. They really didn't have the setting. Maybe we only made the change in our standard NT-office Ghost image, and didn't bother in the NetWare-office one, because NetWare doesn't have this problem.

However, fixing this problem just made another one visible. Way back on 1 December, I figured out that they weren't being logged on by the server on their side of the wan link; rather, a server way the heck away in the Boston office is performing all their logons. This is bad, because it makes the logon process take a really long time to run. It's been slow all along, but the lab staff couldn't tell because the startup process proceeded without waiting for the logon script to finish. Now they can really tell.

So, why doesn't their server--local, fast, and bored out of its skull--process their logons? Why do they crawl across a really slow wan link, to a server that's busy as all hell? That question has been in the back of my mind for a month now, but it's just become somewhat more urgent. I therefore spent much of last night researching just how the Windows NT logon process works, a topic I can heartily recommend avoiding. The answer appears to be: Barely. In a nutshell, there's nothing wrong with their server, this is NT working as designed.

While doing the MCSE reading, I learned that BDCs (Backup Domain Controllers) are primarily intended to process logon requests so the PDC (Primary Domain Controller) can do other things. This is, apparently, not the whole truth. NT workstations will, by design, send all logon requests to the PDC, no matter where it is, even if it's three hops away across slow wan links. Requests might fall back to the BDC if (and only if) the PDC is really busy and pushes them off. Gee, thanks, Microsoft.

This is, to put it mildly, annoying. We have never run across this problem before because each office is its own domain; the lab and the Boston office are the only wan-spanning domain. Still, it's good to find out about this behaviour, because we had concluded that the multi-domain, trust-relationship design was a bad one and we'd like to migrate to a single, company-wide domain with a PDC in Boston and BDCs in all the other offices. Now we know that this will have severe logon processing implications. Clearly we don't want every logon request from every office to have to go to Boston to be processed.

So, what do we do? I have found a few possibilities in my researches, but they require some testing, which I can't do right now because I'm in the middle of another enormous file copy at the lab, so the wan line is pretty saturated at the moment, rendering remote control patchy to impossible. It'll probably be the weekend before I can do any serious experimenting.

Meanwhile, on a slightly less work-related (but still techie) note, we're trying to enable Mike to take remote control of the RiscPC from work. We don't have a specific need to be able to do this just yet, but it would be really cool and you never know when it might come in handy. No success yet, but some progress.

Mike was deep in techie stuff as well, so we ended up keyboard-bashing till after 1:00 before finally calling it a night. Tonight, oh dear, I'm also still working; sometimes it's very difficult to stop. The evenings are when my brain generally works best (especially after the cumulative effects of a day's worth of tea and the occasional meringue¹), so I feel like I'm just getting on a roll when evening comes around. Since I never really leave work, there's no physical reason to stop, so sometimes I don't.

(Much later)

Whoops, forgot to post this last night. Ah well.

¹Ahhh, meringues. As far as I know, we don't get these in the US, although they're quite common here. Allow me to rant about meringues for a moment. A meringue, in the UK, is a light, airy, solid-sugar confection, often used as a base (nearly a dish) upon which a dessert is then constructed. Or, as we've had lately, the meringue may be shaped like a lady's-finger, and two are then used to make a sandwich of chocolate and cream². Eating a meringue is good for an instant and severe sugar rush. Meringues are wonderful things. If they do make them in the US, you should dash right out and get one. Actually, get several.

²Cream here isn't much like US equivalents either. Although I realize that I am amazingly successful at being unobservant, the most sinful kind of cream I ever noticed in the dairy section in the US was whipping cream. Here they get several varieties of cream that go far beyond that. You can buy whipping cream, but you can also buy single cream, double cream, or even extra-thick double cream. It is basically solid at this point. You can spoon it onto something and it retains its shape, and doesn't run. In the hierarchy of sinful foods, these ultra-creams fall not far from the top. Anyway, cream is used on everything here. Wherever we'd put ice cream on something, they put cream on it instead. It's quite nice.

Created at 23:33

Sunday, 14 January

My goodness, what an impressive gap I've got going. It almost seems a shame to spoil it.

Anyway, I haven't vanished off the face of the earth; mostly I've been doing lots of work work work. I'm now quite close to the end of the lab's NetWare-to-NT migration, with a nicely detailed plan of action for how to tackle the much-larger Boston office migration generated as a useful by-product of the exercise. Unfortunately I've become much worse at stopping work in the evenings over the last few days. It's easy, around 11:00 at night, to realize, "Hey, it's 6:00 in the US, most everyone has gone home, I'll just try that one little thing I wanted to do." This happens because most of what I'm doing at the moment is best done while there are as few people on as possible. Theoretically I have lots of time in the mornings before everyone arrives (since I begin work around 3:45 AM from their point of view), but about one morning in three the tunnel is down and I can't do anything (that requires connectivity) till it gets restarted, by which time everyone is there, and I would have to wait until the next day to try whatever it was I wanted to do.

Also, I'm impatiently awaiting a call from Bishop Removals, to tell me when they plan to deliver my stuff. Monday was the first day they might possibly have called. Of course I know, intellectually, that they won't call for another three weeks and when they do, it'll be to inform us that the ship hasn't even arrived yet on account of an unexpected side trip to Fiji, but that doesn't stop me from being hopeful. On Friday I called them, on the grounds that the week during which they said they'd call was now ending; they confirmed that, unsurprisingly, the ship is late, and only (allegedly) arrived on Wednesday. This means it's going to be at least another week before I hear from them. Handily, the delay does mean that we've had plenty of time to get the house ready to receive it all. Of course by now I've been here long enough that I'm used to the house the way it is, and I'm used to not having the stuff around, so it's going to be strange suddenly to have it all back again. But I'll get over it--interleaving our book collections, in particular, promises to be a delightful exercise. (Not to mention what the book influx is going to do to Mike's reading queue, heh heh.)

I've finally dived back into something resembling the level of reading I used to keep up, pre-move. In just the last week or so I've ploughed through two very silly books--Bill Bryson's I'm A Stranger Here Myself, and an excruciatingly silly book about Nostradamus and exploding sheep. This weekend, in a complete about-face, I'm halfway through a very dense Greg Bear (lots of physics, good fun). No doubt this reading binge is partly reaction to having guests two weekends in a row; I'm definitely in a recharge mode now. That's my excuse, anyway.

Yesterday was almost entirely consumed by an unplanned excursion into the depths of MixPix, my wallpaper-shuffler. There was a bug I wanted to root out, which led to some other ones, during the course of fixing which I added some new functionality, created new bugs etc in the usual course of programming projects. You might ask why I would bother writing a wallpaper shuffler when there are many available. The answer is that I began it because I have never found one that does the particular things I want. Since then, of course, it's the fun of the programming project that has sucked me in; it's not the end result that really matters. For instance, by puzzling over some C code, I figured out how to read the image size directly from a JPG, and accordingly was able to write a snippet in MixPix that decides whether a JPG is too big and should be scaled down before turning into wallpaper.

Today we spent a pleasant little while at the Hubble Space Telescope web site, in the end downloading 350+ images. That'll make some good MixPix fodder!

The weather has turned cold--overnight it got down to about -3°C! That's only about 26°F! Shocking, I know. Still, I'm coping. And yes, the lawn and garden are still green.

I notice that this diary still tends to drift into becoming a catalogue of events. I'd prefer it to focus more on thoughts about the events, but my thoughts are, as ever, chaotic and difficult to pin down, and as far as feelings go, well, how many times can I say I'm really enjoying Mike's company without getting dreadfully repetitive (not to mention redundant)? It's true, though; there's no doubt that we are cast from the same bizarre mold. Yesterday, frinstance, we had a wonderfully spirited discussion about the nature of stories, the satisfyingness thereof, and what exactly constitutes an "ending". A casual observer would probably have dug a foxhole and kept their head down, but we were having a great time.

Plus, Mike challenges me. I think my brain was going a bit squishy. Dave used to keep me on my intellectual toes, but it's been years now since we worked closely on projects, so my work wasn't being subjected to any critical analysis worth mentioning. It's quite delightful to have someone around who can actually help me debug my own code, or suggest new approaches to problems at work. And, as I expected, being two INTPs together, we're getting to explore being INTP without either of us pressuring the other to be different.

So, if anyone has been wondering whether we're really getting on now that I'm here full time, I can report quite definitively that we are. (Hmm, I don't think I've explicitly said so before.)

Right, that's quite enough sentimental stuff for one diary entry. Back to Greg Bear and strange physics. And maybe some chocolate.

Created at 22:07

Tuesday, 16 January

I may possibly be the most spoiled person on the planet.

Why, you ask? Well, tonight my sweetie came home from work with Metallica S&M...on DVD. If you thought Nothing Else Matters was good on the CD, you should try it on the DVD, with really good speakers positioned for ideal stereo imaging. Wow.

So I'm not exactly accomplishing a lot this evening, but it sure is fun.

Aside from that, a new tech toy; I bought (or rather, H&A bought) a copy of PartitionMagic to resolve some convenience issues. See, there are two hard drives in my computer, and two CD drives, for a total of 4 IDE devices, so we can't add any more. But for work purposes, I need to have another drive that I can ghost clean as needed. At the moment this means opening the case, unplugging the two drives and plugging in a third drive. That's not very convenient because I can't use anything on the regular drives until I'm done with the third drive, unplug it, and plug the other two back in. Not to mention that any one of these times I could bend a pin or otherwise damage something, which wouldn't help.

One possible solution we considered was to remove one of the CD drives and put the third HD in its bay. We don't really need both CD drives; there are two because one is a CD-writer. We could take out the plain CD, leave the CD-writer, and use it as our sole CD drive. The only drawback to this is, the writer doesn't read very fast, and of course then we couldn't rip CDs to MP3s from two drives simultaneously. :-) So then we thought of creating another partition on one of the existing drives and just using that, instead of a whole entire spare drive. Trouble is, I already had all the available space allocated. Enter PartitionMagic, which allows resizing and other operations on partitions. So I bought it this morning, and have already reduced the size of one partition and created a new one in its place.

But there's a snag. Now I need PartitionMagic's BootMagic utility to handle the boot menu, because things have become too complicated to handle naturally. We have, at this point, a Win2K partition, a bootable FAT partition, a non-bootable NTFS partition, and a new partition I haven't done anything with but want to be bootable to DOS, which we can't do. Unfortunately, BootMagic can't work with the system in its current configuration; the primary boot partition has to be FAT16 or FAT32, which it isn't.

So now what? Well, we thought about swapping the drives around so the NT drive is primary and the Win2K drive is slave. Unfortunately the necessary jumper settings are printed on the drives themselves, so we can't read them without taking the drives out. But when we put the drives in, one of the screw heads broke off, so they're not coming out. Ever. Instead, Mike hit upon the idea of reducing the size of the Win2K partition and creating yet another partition on that drive, and making it the active boot partition. This, in theory, ought to work.

Of course we didn't want to do all this scary partition stuff to the drives without having a backup, so along the way I've had to get File & Print Services for NetWare working on our server; even as I type this, my computer is in the process of having the Win2K partition ghosted out via a DOS boot and NetWare login to our server.

Are you still with me? I didn't think so. Trust me, it's complicated and it's fun. At the end, when it all works, and the thing is about as complicated as it possibly can be and still boot, that'll be very satisfying.

Meanwhile, on a totally different note...When I came here, I had to be sure to bring anything I was going to need for the first couple months, knowing my stuff wouldn't get here for quite some time. But, in addition to that, I very cleverly brought large quantities of consumables, like shampoo, so that I'd have some time to acclimatize before I had to find replacements. For the same reason, I did as much as I could at the very end in the US, to put off how soon I'd have to do it again here. Well, all this preparation was all very clever, but now I'm starting to run up against some of these things, and do you suppose I've done anything to get ready for them? Nope. The case in point that brings this up is that I'm getting pretty seriously overdue for a haircut. Do you suppose I've done anything in furtherance of finding a place to cut my hair? Nope. Still, putting off doing anything about it is fun. Any day now, I'll carefully compare places and select one (probably by opening the yellow pages, closing my eyes and pointing.)

Instead of choosing hairstylists, I've wisely spent the time doing things like reading. I've hacked the queue down quite a bit in the last week or so...or at least I thought I had, until I updated it this afternoon. I took five books out of the queue (not bad for just over a week)...but I had five more books to add! I didn't actually make any net progress at all!

Created at 22:50

Friday, 19 January

Monday! Monday Monday Monday! ...Mon! ...Day!

Today I got The Call from Bishop Removals; they are bringing my stuff on Monday. Wheee! But I have to remember to be realistic; it seems a lot to ask that everything should arrive undamaged, so I have to expect some casualties. Well, whatever happens, once the movers have gone, we should have a good time figuring out where to put everything, and interleaving book and CD collections. It's all very exciting...But I think I'd better take a look through my database; I've forgotten what I shipped and what I put in storage.

Meanwhile...Remember all that stuff I wrote in the last entry about partitions and whatnot? Well, I spent the next day trashing it all, several times. More than once I had to restore the Windows 2000 partition from the Ghost backup we made of it. PartitionMagic and BootMagic are powerful utilities, but they can't change the fact that PC disk and partition handling is complex and arcane at best. It's still quite possible to get into a lot of trouble. Anyway, after a bit of a rethink, I now have an adequate setup. We can still boot to either NT or 2000, and I can conveniently reghost a test partition without having to swap drives (which was the original goal of this whole exercise). I can also boot to DOS without a boot disk now, which is handy.

I've already been making extensive use of my new Ghost partition. I've created a WinInstall for Janna, an enormous SQL contact management app that the company plans to roll out to replace Act and the various other PIMs that we've accumulated. For as complex an app as it is, the WinInstall was surprisingly easy.

Work's NetWare grace period has apparently ended. Now that David and I are both gone, there is nobody left (physically, anyway) with any real NetWare knowledge. Fortunately, NetWare tends to be very stable and low maintenance, but everyone's luck runs out sometime. Yesterday afternoon Jill called in a panic because the Groups volume was broadcasting--every minute or so, to all users--that it was nearly out of space. Not a big deal, fortunately; I walked her through the process of allocating more space to it. Then, tonight, she called again because the TEST server kept abending. That's a little more serious. Fortunately, TEST (as its name implies) isn't a production server; we use it mostly for various IT purposes. Its only real production function is that it runs much of the GroupWise back end, and that's what was falling over. The problem was easy to identify, and the server was handling it all very well (they didn't realize that a NetWare server can carry on after an abend, so they were shutting down and restarting after each one, which isn't really necessary).

One of the CPU fans in our home server has developed an astonishing rattle. It sounds like a very small diesel engine idling roughly in the corner. We need to do something about it, but that might be difficult because it's an unusual size of CPU. Perhaps I'll ask work to send me a bunch of CPU fans from dead identical computers.

We're still in our cold snap here; it has actually fallen below 20°F the last couple of nights. When it gets frosty, a strange thing happens here (at least I think it's strange; for all I know, it might be common in the US as well and I just never noticed it). Overnight, a frost settles, and then it doesn't go away. The grass in the back garden has had a thick frost on it for days now. I'm almost sure that we don't get that in the US; the frost goes away during the day, even if it never gets warm. Why it stays on the ground here, I don't know. Anyway, it gives things a hint of magic, like they had a frost storm instead of an ice storm. This morning on the weather report, they predicted "freezing fog", another new one.

Since I got here, I've learned something interesting about being cold. This house is fairly old (built in the 30s), and like any house of this age and style, not particularly easy to heat. Mike is very understanding and accommodating about my cold intolerance, but the kind of ambient heating I take for granted just isn't possible here; heat leaks out and cold leaks in all over the place. Draughts and cold spots are unavoidable. Instead, the usual strategy is to concentrate on heating the areas where you're going to be, and not worry much about the rest of the house. Mike is indifferent to chill and pretty much lets me have free rein with the heating. I assumed this was because he's one of those people with a hyper-metabolism who is warm all the time, which he is, to some degree, but that's not the whole story. Often his hands and feet are like ice. The difference is, he just doesn't mind being cold. This is not a possibility that had previously occurred to me. I assumed that people who don't mind cold weren't feeling it. I have always recognized only two states: (1) warm and (2) miserable. Clearly there is more to it than that, for some people. I'm not sure what this all means, but I definitely find it interesting.

I'm discovering that it's more difficult to remember to call people in the US than I had thought it would be. The trouble is that I don't think of it at the right times. During the early evening, when it crosses my mind, it's still the middle of the afternoon there and everyone is, of course, at work. Then, by the time people get home, I'm deep into reading or programming or whatever, and the next thing I know, it's bedtime.

Created at 22:39 (but not uploaded until Saturday)

Sunday, 21 January

Yesterday was a wonderful day, spent entirely on procrastinating. We did almost nothing in preparation for the imminent arrival of stuff. Instead, we played with computers, and read, and generally didn't get ready. It was lots of fun.

One thing I did yesterday was take the DDLI. This is someone else's version of an MBTI test. It's a much longer, more comprehensive test than the regular Keirsey one, full of all kinds of difficult questions. It also doesn't give a yes-no choice for answers; instead, it lets you choose from a wide range of how strongly you agree or disagree. The test doesn't come out with a single result; instead it gives values for all the categories, so you can get an idea of how strongly you lean. Here's how I came out:

I 59 (E 12)
N 72 (S 6)
T 99 (F 8)
P 68 (J 0)

So, according to these results, I'm extreme in my T-F preference, but not nearly so extreme in E-I. The N-S polarity isn't surprising at all, but the T-F score did surprise me. I thought I'd come out a bit fluffier than that.

Hmm, still an extreme INTP. What a shock. Notice that amazing score in the J category: ZERO. We didn't know, prior to this, whether you could get a zero in any category on the DDLI. This is especially amusing because of the two of us, I look more J at the moment. We've divided things up so that Mike does the cooking and I do the washing up, so I've been keeping the kitchen remarkably clean (for me) and staying relatively caught up on the washing up. Therefore I almost look like a tidy person. (Although, amusingly enough, Mike is running around dusting things, right at this very moment.) It's all an illusion, though. It's easy to keep up on the dishes when I'm home all day; when my brain gets stuck, or the tunnel goes down, or I start something that will take half an hour to finish running, I can wander into the kitchen and do some dishes. Once I rejoin the ranks of those who have to go to work, it won't be nearly so easy to stay caught up, so I won't.

Meanwhile...Ow. Ow. Ow! One of my wisdom teeth is acting up. It's been months since any of them did, which is a pretty long time. This isn't anything serious (i.e. it most certainly won't lead to me having anything done about them); it will just hurt for a few days and then get better. Not especially fun, though. Big headache, careful chewing, lots of Advil.

Right, gotta go. Mike is making five-spice lamb...

Created at 20:11

Monday, 22 January

Ug.

Definitely ug. Or, in Mike's assessment, flurble. We're tired. It's been a long day.

The movers showed up at about 12:30, and were gone before 1:30. They brought everything in, set it down, and left. Technically they were supposed to unpack everything, but when I asked them about this, I got an eye-roll and an answer something like "Well, we do it, if you really want us to," which didn't especially inspire confidence. This was fine with us; we didn't want it all unboxed right then, but we didn't think we'd have a choice in the matter. It turned out well that we didn't have them do it; this place would have been a zoo. It's chaotic enough right now, with half the boxes yet unopened.

Progress has been made, though; most of the furniture is in place, and we have even interleaved our CD collections onto the bookcases in the living room. It's an impressive sight, even after you take out the duplicates (of which there are not as many as you might think). I've unpacked and put away all the clothing-related stuff, and the linens, and all the bathroom stuff. Still remaining to be done: the books and the kitchen stuff, for the most part.

Amazingly, there hasn't been any damage or breakage so far. Some of the paperback books got their covers and pages bent around severely, but spending a few months squeezed between other books will fix that.

One thing I hadn't expected was how cold everything was when it arrived. As Mike unwrapped the bookcases, condensation formed on the outsides.

Chinese take-away for dinner, not surprisingly. I called to order in advance, and it must be some indication of my mental state that I said I wanted to place a "take-out order", thus greatly confusing the lady on the other end. Duh, I know they call it take-away, but the ol' brain wasn't volunteering that information just then.

We took lots of pictures during the course of today's festivities, but we haven't sorted them out yet. Later.

Created at 22:52

Friday, 26 January

What, Friday already?! Where did the week go?

It's been a very busy week, not surprisingly. Whenever we're not working, we're moving stuff from Point A to Point B and, as often as not, back to Point A again. The CDs are finished, having moved around somewhat from their initial configuration. Also completed, as of tonight, are the books. They were quite a project. Organizing bookshelves is easier when you buy the bookcases and the books as you go along. Instead, we were faced with hundreds of books, some empty bookcases, and no real idea how densely we would have to pack the books on the shelves in order to get them to fit. The first cut came surprisingly close; one final major reorganization last night and some minor tweaking this evening seems to have finished it off. No doubt there will be a few more moves, but they will be minor, not complete reorganizations from the ground up.

Oh yes, the videos are also in a relatively final configuration. This leaves only the kitchen stuff yet undealt-with. That will probably be this weekend's major project.

For your amusement, here are some photos from the process. There are rather a lot of them, I'm afraid, and they still only take you up through Wednesday night.

Monday
Before - The state of things on Monday morning, before anything arrived
	Living room (88 KB).
	Dining room (83 KB). Because it was mostly empty, we planned to have the boxes of books and kitchen stuff put in here until we could sort them out.
	Guest room (39 KB). The guest room was empty. We'd soon fix that.
Bring In the Stuff
	Unloading (111 KB). That happens to be the reading chair footstool he's carrying.
	Guest room filling up (87 KB). The bookcase is readily identifiable; the other two objects are a nightstand and the headboard to the bed. (Shh, they're in disguise.)
	Third bedroom really filling up (84 KB). The third bedroom in this house is rather small and consequently not used for anything yet. We had the movers put anything we didn't want to deal with yet (framed pictures, boxes of clothing, sheets and towels, you get the idea) in here.
Unwrapping and Unboxing - Now the chaos really begins...
	Wanna buy a box? (116 KB) Remember that nice, neat, nearly empty dining room from a few photos ago? Oh dear.
	Where did the landing go? (73 KB) I'm sure it was here a few minutes ago... Remember that all the furniture was wrapped in cardboard-ish stuff prior to shipment? It's more difficult to remove than you might think, especially because of the tape. You can't tear it, and you can't just slash the tape with a stanley knife, because you'd probably gouge the furniture it's protecting. Tuesday morning conveniently happens to be rubbish day; we threw away 5 bin bags full of this cardboard wrapping the very next morning, and there'll probably be as many again before we're done.
	Boxes (89 KB). All those boxes have to go somewhere, and the front hall was the only space that wasn't busy already, so it was elected. You can also see one of the aforementioned bin bags full of cardboard wrapping lurking in the lower left corner, beside the stairs.
Progress
	CD shelves (95 KB). By the end of Monday night, we had all the CDs on the shelves. That involved taking Mike's CDs out of their existing drawers, integrating them with mine (after finding mine), categorizing them, alphabetizing them, and putting them on the shelves. Not bad for all in the same day. Of course it's all changed since, but it was nice to have some order, even if it wasn't final. Oh, and you can see the coffee table in the foreground. And how d'ya like the blue finish on that guitar!
Wednesday
More Progress
	More boxes (100 KB). You can see that things are getting a bit more under control; the boxes are now neatly collapsed and stacked. Well, the ones that have made it out here, anyway.
	Even more boxes (66 KB). OK, so the landing hasn't improved much. That very tall box on the left, by the way, is a wardrobe box. It's nearly as tall as me, and it has a clothing rod built into it. Anything I had on hangers, they just put in this box without folding or bothering with the hangers. This box and its smaller friends are still here because they are stuffed completely full of packing paper, and I mean stuffed. It's well compacted. Plus I have three or four other boxes full of paper elsewhere in the house. I have no idea how we're going to get rid of all this paper. We will have to find somewhere to recycle it. (But how will we get it all there...)
	Last few piles of books (77 KB). We somehow managed not to take any pictures of the dining room when all the books were stacked around in piles. By Wednesday night, we'd made a first pass at putting everything into bookcases. These are some of the last few unshelved books. Earlier in the day, there were probably at least 40 or 50 of these stacks.
	Shelving books (94 KB). And indeed here I am, assembling one section of our 800-piece book puzzle. Hmm, looking at that picture, most of those books aren't in the same places any more... But who cares, you can see floor!

I'd planned to put in some pictures from tonight as well, but it's taken far too long to organize these ones, so it's late already. I guess it'll have to wait till tomorrow.

...Oh, what the heck. I'll go take a few pictures.

Friday
Now - The state of things an hour ago
	Guest room now (69 KB). The guest room is no longer empty. My family will easily recognize these familiar objects.
	Books in the guest room (90 KB). Here's where some of them ended up. You have to pretend not to notice the cardboard wrapping still lurking in the background.
	Books in the dining room (83 KB). The dining room has turned into something of a library, which we think is cool.
	More books in the dining room (87 KB). These bookcases are to the right of the fireplace you see in the previous picture.
	Books and CDs (96 KB). Moving right along to the living room... The CDs ended up sharing space with more books. That's Mike's Pratchett/Gaiman collection along the top row.
	More books in the living room (89 KB). You can also see, on my monitor (on the left), this diary entry being constructed. Sebastian has also resumed his place of honour on top of the monitor, although now he has to share it with a rubber ducky.

Not surprisingly, since we've been spending our evenings arranging the books and the CDs, these pictures ended up being of...the books and the CDs. Believe it or not, there are yet more bookcases that aren't included among these pictures. Four of them, in fact.

I have also organized and put away clothing, sheets, towels, and most of the other things I had shipped. There's not much left undone. Well, except the kitchen.

I did manage to pull one remarkably lame stunt. Before moving, I carefully went through the books for what I should bring and what books Mike already had, because books weigh a lot and really drove up the cost of the move. But, I thought, the CDs are lightweight, so it's not worth devoting any time to deciding which ones I'd like to bring and which ones I could leave behind. Well, I forgot about the duplicates question. I managed to bring about 15 duplicate CDs. Ah well.

So, what else is going on? On Tuesday, I had to go to the bank to pay my credit card bill. Why, you ask? Because (I answer) the Merseyside post had been on strike for a week, and time was running out. As it happened, the strike ended Tuesday; but even if I had posted it then, it's doubtful that it would have arrived in time to be credited before its due date. Anyway, I went to the bank, and happened to have as a cashier (teller) the same lady who opened my account. She hasn't seen me since October (and only ever met me twice then), but she remembered me anyway. Wow. Now that's a people person.

Also on Tuesday, Mike's passport came back from the IRS (hooray!). Its arrival was what caused me to deduce that the postal strike was over. No ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) yet, but at least the passport is back. I'd hate for my government to lose his passport.

Meanwhile, do you know anyone who needs boxes? How about packing paper?

Created at 01:17

Saturday, 27 January

STOP THE PRESSES!

A broken item! There was a broken item among the kitchen stuff we unpacked today! Oh, the shock and horror of it all!

Well, OK, so it was the handle of a chip clip¹--not exactly an irreplaceable heirloom. Actually I'm quite impressed; aside from the framed prints, we're now completely unpacked, and that unfortunate chip clip was the only casualty. All the dishes and glassware--even the bottle of maple syrup--arrived intact.

Upon reflection, I shall have to fill out a glowing reference for Humboldt, my moving company. They managed to transport 2,800 pounds of household goods--13 bookcases, two bedside tables, two end tables, a coffee table, a bed frame, a reading chair, 400+ books, 150 CDs, 75 videotapes, my entire Santa Fe dish set, half a kitchen's worth of baking/cooking pans and other crockery and cutlery, various and sundry clothing, most of my fragile little decorative bookshelf knick-knacks, and plenty of other miscellaneous items--3,000 miles across the ocean, through however many different companies and sets of hands, without a scratch except for one chip clip and a few CD jewel cases. Oh, and possibly a slightly-deformed-from-round frying pan. Still!

One teensy unexpected problem: There are two items missing, to wit: one brass candlestick (half of a pair), and a tiny outdoor thermometer. I have a feeling they were simply overlooked in the vast swathes of packing paper. So now I have a quandary: Give them up for lost, or undertake an incredibly tedious search through about fifteen cubic yards of well-compacted packing paper for two items that are doubtless bent and broken out of all recognition by now (due to the compacting)? Hmm. I could easily do without the outdoor thermometer, but having just one of a pair of brass candlesticks is rather useless.

And, oh dear, it has just occurred to me that there may well be other tiny items lost in the packing paper, whose absence I haven't noticed yet...

As we unpack, I'm amazed at how clear and obvious it now seems, in retrospect, what I should and should not have brought. When I was trying to decide what to bring, it was all very muddled and unclear. Of course that's mostly because having been here for a while, I'm now quite familiar with what we use on a regular basis and what's unlikely to be used--information I didn't have while packing. But now that I've been without it all for a couple of months, it seems like an appallingly enormous quantity of unnecessary stuff. Well, I'm sure I'll get re-accustomed to having it around. It'll all fade back into the background noise of how-things-normally-are, which I routinely ignore anyway.

The kitchen stuff isn't fully sorted out yet, by any means, but we've come a long way. Mike did an impressive job of freeing up cabinet space, so there is now a fairly even mix of my dishes and his in the cabinets. I must say, Mike has been incredibly accommodating throughout this process. I'm not at all sure whether I'd have held up equally well, were our situations reversed. He's dealing quite calmly with what amounts to an invasion. My stuff is everywhere; the furniture has all had to be rearranged; things aren't in their familiar locations any more. And yet he's quite placid about the whole thing. Astonishing.

I did only one other thing today, and it's a highly questionable decision: I resubscribed to the INTP mailing list. (With eyes tightly shut, and looking away from the keyboard as I did so.) I unsubscribed way back in July, when Mike visited the US, because I knew I'd be out and about for two weeks and didn't want to face a couple thousand messages when I got back. Well, I never resubscribed, because once he left, I immediately dived into preparing for the move, which didn't leave time for sifting through 200-300 emails per day. Thing is, though, Mike is still subscribed, and I catch myself reading it over his shoulder, so today I took the plunge and resusbcribed. The question is whether I really want to deal with that volume of messages again. Sadly, I can't just ignore messages that appear to have topics I'm not interested in; this is a list-full of INTPs, so the messages tend to stay on topic for about two replies before drifting off into totally unrelated subjects. Thus it's not easy to do triage on the barrage.

Of course this led down the tangential pathway of trying to find a mail client that will allow multiple POP3 accounts...I have a candidate, but it has shortcomings; not sure yet whether they're tolerable or whether I should keep looking.

¹I imagine that to a British person, this probably sounds like an arcane implement for pinning french fries together, or maybe for trimming them. In actuality, a chip clip is simply a clothes-pin-like device for keeping a bag of crisps closed.

Created at 00:37

Tuesday, 30 January

My lost sheep are found! And all I had to do was go through all three kitchen-stuff boxes, pull out each crinkled-up sheet of packing paper, and flatten it all into a nice, neat stack. Sounds pretty awful, doesn't it? In reality, it took surprisingly little time; I did the paper from all three boxes in under half an hour. And, naturally, during the course of flattening each sheet, the missing candlestick and thermometer appeared, nestled in wads of paper that felt empty.

I had actually decided that they weren't worth looking for. But while I was thinking about how I might go about doing it, it occurred to me that (in accordance with the principles of suitcase-packing), the packing paper might fit in a much smaller space if it were neatly flattened, instead of being wadded-up into lumps, however tightly compressed. Such a neat stack might be manageable enough to get into the car, and hence to the recycling bins at Tesco's. Now that's a result that would be worth the effort. And indeed it is so; instead of three enormous boxes overflowing with packing paper, I now have a single stack about a foot thick, less if I stand on it. This will be much easier to deal with.

Of course now the horrible question is: Do I do the same thing with the rest of the packing paper scattered around the house? Unfortunately, I think the answer is probably yes. But the kitchen boxes involved a disporportionate amount of packing paper, so I think I've already done nearly half of it.

For your entertainment, here are a few pictures from the unpacking of the kitchen stuff on Saturday.

Saturday
	Overview (90 KB). An overview of the dining room, just after we'd finished emptying all three kitchen boxes. (The tiny box on the right isn't one of them.) There are dishes and kitchen things on every available surface. The table (and chairs) by the window hold most of my Santa Fe dishes. You can see part of the pile of pots and pans on the floor in the lower right. But mostly what you see is the boxes, and quite a lot of the packing paper I went on about above.
	On the table (100 KB). A closer shot of the table groaning under the dishes, with a few spilling over onto the chairs and the window sill. And packing paper, of course. Weird, isn't it, what perspective can do to a photo? Have a look at the windows, at the separation between the upper and lower panes, and follow it across from left to right.
	On the sideboard (69 KB). More stuff piled on the sideboard, and on the reading chair side-table. If you look closely, you can see my veteran bottle of maple syrup, just in front of the small chest of drawers on top of the sideboard. Those small drawers, by the way, contain Mike's meccano set, an enormous collection of gears and other parts. From these parts, you can create various things, like working gearboxes, working cars, etc. Cool stuff.

I have learned something interesting about myself during the course of this unpacking and organizing. Suppose I acquire a new object that doesn't have an obvious place where it should go (for instance, a small picture in a standalone frame). What I do, I have realized, is look around, reluctantly choose a place where it might go, and figure that I'll put it there for a while to see how it works out--I can always move it later. Well, within about ten minutes after being set down, it recedes into the background and I stop noticing it. Then, weeks or months later, if I'm faced with having to move it (perhaps to accommodate something else), I resist, because that's where it belongs. Somehow, during the intervening time, without me consciously deciding anything, the location has changed from being dubiously probationary to obviously right. If I then (grudgingly) move the object somewhere else, within a short time its new home is the obviously-right location from which I'd subsequently resist moving it!

So, no matter how reluctant to move something I might think I am, it's very likely that shortly after the move I'll be completely comfortable with its new location. I think the resistance comes from not wanting my ignored background to change, because then it's distracting until it becomes background again. This is a very useful bit of self-knowledge. Chances are I'll be a lot more easygoing about such things in the future.

Going through the mental exercise of how I might have reacted to an influx of Mike's stuff, were our positions reversed, is what made me realize this about myself. I've been, as I've mentioned, thoroughly impressed by how unfazed Mike is about completely reorganizing everything. You might expect that he'd have had his stuff exactly where he wanted it, and expect me to fit in around the existing layout, but it hasn't been that way at all. There's hardly an item here that hasn't moved from its original location--even the ones that he did have exactly where he wanted them.

No entries for the last couple of days. Sunday night, we had dinner at Mike's mother's and didn't get home until quite late, and last night we went to the supermarket, which again got us in rather late. (We had fun at the supermarket, carrying on a spirited discussion about the nature of consciousness whilst trying, vainly, to pay attention to the items on the shelves.)

Created at 21:43

Wednesday, 31 January

In troubleshooting my ongoing tunnel problem today, I threw out everything I know about technology and logic.

Over the last few days, you see, I've been noticing one of those illusory trends that sometimes seem to exist in an intermittent problem. It is this: The tunnel works fine when I first connect it in the morning, but the first time I go away for more than a few minutes (to have lunch or whatever), I lose it, and it never comes back again until the next morning. It's tempting to think that whenever the tunnel isn't being actively used for a few minutes, it fails. But that's absurd! There is no technological or logical reason why non-use should make it fail. It's not as if it gets bored, or lonely, or forgets where the packets are supposed to go if it isn't reminded regularly. So I've been resisting noticing this "trend", because it's about as reasonable as blaming it on the computer being in a bad mood. It's practically superstitious, like thinking the photocopier breaks because it knows you're in a hurry, or that the light won't turn green until you take the car out of gear.

Well, this morning I thought what the heck. Somewhat sheepishly, I made sure that if I had to leave the computer, no matter how short a time, or if I was doing something on the computer that didn't involve tunnel traffic, I ran something that created make-work tunnel traffic. And would you believe, the stupid thing stayed up fine all day for the first time in about two weeks? On two occasions, I let it slide for a few minutes and nearly lost it, but got it back again. Finally, around dinner-time, I left it for about fifteen minutes, and it failed. This makes no sense whatsoever.

There are only two possible conclusions: Either today just happened to be a better tunnel day, and the tunnel failing when it did was pure coincidence, or there really is some reason why an in-use tunnel is less likely to fail than an idle one. (For the last two weeks, anyway. It was fine before that, which makes me even less inclined to give credence to any of this.)

Sadly, I know nothing about tunnels and firewalls and all that happy stuff. I can't begin to pursue this in a sensible manner. Meanwhile, shall I superstitiously make sure the computer is always using the tunnel? I feel silly, plus rather pressured; I have to remember not to go more than a few minutes without doing something that sends traffic over the tunnel.

On the home front, last night we found locations for the remaining kitchen stuff. Everything has a home now. All that's left is cleaning up the residual cardboard wrapping and packing paper. I even tackled some of that tonight, although it's still by no means done.

Last night I finished another Greg Egan book: Permutation City. As you'll see if you bravely venture into my increasingly-long Book Ratings page, I gave it a rare and coveted 10! I can't say enough good things about Greg Egan, at least his works that I've read so far. He's quickly becoming one of my favourite authors. He goes through ideas at such a clip, and so casually, that I have to wonder if he goes around having ideas 24 hours a day and can't use them up fast enough. He uses more ideas in a short story than some authors do in a career. It's seriously mind-stretching stuff, yet very readable and entertaining. Can't ask for more than that, really.

There's nothing nicer than discovering a new favourite author; I have his whole backlog of work awaiting me. Much better than after I've read it all, and then have to wait a year or two between new books.

Created at 01:02